LE TRIO INFERNAL is a 1974 French film based on an actual event, in which a criminal trio, a conniving attorney and two beautiful sisters murder people to make profits in insurance fraud. Michel Piccoli as George and Romy Schneider as Philomene play their sinister characters vividly and realistically.
There is a scene where the trio invites one couple for Christmas dinner and kills them. After George shot them dead without mercy, he placed the victim's bodies in bathtubs and covered with sulfuric acid to dissolve them. It is sort of funny that the three struggles and sweats to lug the bodies up to the bathroom realizing that making dead bodies disappear is much harder than they expected. The scene tells the audience a lesson of how it takes lots of work to murder people. After finishing the tough work, George and Philomene gaze at each other panting and do sexual act at the dead bodies.
In the scene that they pour the content of bathtubs, thick black liquid into the hole they dug on the yard, the comical plop sound which George makes when he ladles the content out of the bathtub creates creepy mood. It is striking that the director put happy BGM on the scene where two beauties wearing gas masks go back and forth between the bathroom to the yard million times carrying buckets full of the disgusting liquid. In doing so, he seems to make fun of their grotesque behavior and ironically emphasize the brutality of murder. In addition to those remarkable depictions, great performances by Piccoli, Schneider and Gomska as Catherine, Philomene's younger sister make this film fine and attractive one.
After the trio killed the couple, they still keep murdering to make profits and live a decadent life. I think criminals like them who don't see people as a person but only a victim of their game are hideous and magnetic at the same time. LE TRIO INFERNAL is definitely a brilliant crime film.